Deregulator: Alive since '85!

How else would we learn of the desire by Trekkies to "get their Kirk on," as The New York Times reports? (Hat tip: The Corner .)

Yesterday came reports that the Obama administration might force wounded veterans to get treatment under their own private health insurance. Now comes news that the administration has suspended the program that allows commercial pilots to safely carry firearms aboard planes . The Federal Flight Deck Officers program was instituted after 9/11 to enable formal training of pilots in firearms use as a way to protect passengers in case a genuine security risk (not just a terrorist threat) emerges when a plane is aloft. And yet a Washington Times editorial says the White House has secretly diverted $2 million that was used to train flight officers and instead will pay bureaucrats to harass, er, "conduct field inspections" of pilots who have been certified to carry. Since Mr. Obama's election, pilots have told us that the approval process for letting pilots carry guns on planes slowed significantly. Last week the problem went from bad to worse. Federal Flight Deck Officers - th...

To provide some spending leeway to expand federal health-care subsidies, the Obama administration is reportedly considering a plan that would require wounded U.S. veterans to pay for their service-related injuries using private health insurance. (Hat tip: NRO's Campaign Spot .) Unless you're in favor of privatizing the armed forces, the idea is not only manifestly unfair -- the nation's taxpayers have an obligation to pay for the treatment of those injured defending the country -- but it's also absolutely nuts politically. It reinforces the most damning indictments of the Democratic Party's left -- primarily that they hate the military. Even if this idea founders, Obama will have a tough time living it down. Veterans groups have the memories of elephants, and they do not accept slights (real or imagined) gracefully. While I was at the Rocky Mountain News, we supported a proposal by the Veterans Administration to share a new hospital with the University of Colorado ...

The state constitution is whatever the courts say it is. That's the upshot of yesterday's 6-1 ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court upholding a tax-rate freeze championed by Gov. Bill Ritter and passed by the 2007 legislature. For those of you outside Colorado, here's this convoluted story in a nutshell. The 1992 constitutional amendment known as the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights requires, among other things, a vote of the people before approving "any new tax, tax rate increase, mill levy [property tax hike] above that for the prior year -- or a tax policy change directly causing a net revenue gain to any district." Another provision of TABOR -- the one that drives liberals really crazy -- requires the government to issue tax refunds if revenues grow faster than inflation plus population growth. Residents of individual school districts can elect to forgo reductions in property tax rates that would be mandated by TABOR, again by popular vote. Since 1995, 174 of the...

A new news site is born. Thirty former Rocky Mountain News staffers announced the launch of InDenverTimes.com , a subscription-based online publication . Their goal: Line up 50,000 subscribers by April 23, what would have been the Rocky's 150th anniversary, and go live May 4. At $7 a month ($5 if you sign up for a year), initial subscriptions will be roughly half the cost of The Denver Post, A lot of familiar names (and decades of institutional/intellectual capital) if you're a Rocky reader: Sam Adams, Mark Brown, Mary Chandler, Kevin Flynn, Tillie Fong, Gary Massaro, David Milstead, Bill Scanlon, Marc Shulgold, Ed Stein and Mark Wolf. Along with some not-as-familiar ones, mainly from the paper's fine stable of editors. Gotta keep folks on deadline, right? Best of luck to 'em. There'll be no shortage of news for the Timesters to provide. UPDATE: Mike Roberts at Westword covers the press conference that kicked off the project. As the earlier announcement mentioned,...

In The Atlantic , my friend and former boss Virginia Postrel explains why super-intelligent policy-makers falsely believed that had tamed the ups and downs of the economy. And why their miscalculations may keep us in a funk for longer than is necessary. Congratulating policy makers for “the virtual disappearance of the business cycle” oversteps the evidence and encourages the hubris that fostered the current crisis and could make recovery more difficult. The conventional explanation for the Great Moderation gives too much credit to easily identifiable economic policy makers—“I feel the contribution of good policy cannot be overstated,” said [Christina] Romer — and too little to all those anonymous managers and workers whose everyday actions get summarized in the aggregate statistics that Fed economists watch so closely. Read the whole thing.